Columnists and politicians decrying the decline of the West can't seem to define what it is they're defending. The entire concept was developed for a very particular historical moment.

May 22, 2018

If there is
an international order, it seems to be in crisis. Vladimir Putin boasts of new
nuclear weaponry impervious to NATO defenses and is accused of ordering an
assassination on British soil; Xi Jinping has been relieved of presidential
term limits and is positioning China as an alternative to Western liberalism;
and Kim Jong Un has transformed himself from the frequently lampooned leader of
a pariah state into a diplomatic player on a world scale. In a recent Op Ed in The New York Times, Bret Stephens warned of the rise of “Dictatorship, Inc.”—an “axis of evil” that includes Russia, China, Korea, Syria, and Iran. His
prescription was a renewed “belief in what used to be called the free world.”

Meanwhile,
in the ten years since the financial crisis, the Western core of the global
order has fractured internally, with movements of the right and left
increasingly skeptical of the viability of the European and Atlantic
communities. The election of an “America First” candidate in 2016 seemed to
signal a U.S. retreat from the community of shared strategic interests associated
with the “West.” Some now look for leadership in Europe. In a September
interview on MSNBC, Hillary Clinton declared Angela Merkel to be “the most
important leader in the free world.” A few months later, the French commentator
Nicolas Tenzer wondered whether the mantle of free world leadership might be
assumed by Emmanuel Macron.

The “free world” framework proved
remarkably successful in justifying a cohesive Western alliance and
U.S.-dominated global order of unprecedented power and scope.

But while
dangers abound, defenders of the current order seem to have difficulty defining
the system they seek to preserve. What justifies the continued existence of a
transatlantic alliance binding the U.S. to Western Europe, and how does it
relate to a broader global order? What is the free world that Stephens wants to
revive and that Merkel and Macron have been nominated to lead? What is being
challenged by foreign dictators and anti-establishment movements? How was the
construction of the current order originally justified and in whose name should
it be preserved?

The term
“free world” emerged in the late 1930s and early 1940s as an anti-fascist
rallying cry. In the spring of 1938, a group of French writers and politicians,
including former Prime Minister Édouard Herriot, founded a magazine called
“Monde libre” (Free World) in an attempt to foster greater solidarity among
democratic nations. Four years later, at the height of WWII, the American Vice
President Henry Wallace emphasized the existential nature of the global
conflict in a speech to the U.S.-based International Free World Association:
“This is a fight between a slave world and a free world. Just as the United
States in 1862 could not remain half slave and half free, so in 1942 the world
must make its decision for a complete victory one way or the other.” Later that
year, the Oscar-winning Frank Capra propaganda film “Prelude to War”
illustrated the point by showing two spheres side by side, one black and one
white, one a “free world” and the other a “slave world,” each encompassing an
entire globe. The message was clear and much repeated: the planet had become
small and interdependent; the forces of slavery had set out to conquer the
world; and the fate of freedom everywhere depended on their defeat.

The Allies
prevailed, but U.S. leaders soon declared a new war of the worlds. The Soviet
Union’s westward expansion and communism’s ideological appeal seemed to
constitute a serious challenge to the postwar order envisioned by the United
States. In 1950, National Security Council Report 68—a major internal statement
on U.S. foreign policy—stressed the threat posed to the “free world” by “slave
society.” This time the borders between the two worlds were mostly static and
easily mapped.

The Cold War incarnation of the “free
world” envisioned a neatly Manichean globe with membership and moral attributes
clearly defined on each side. Policymakers constructing the Western alliance in
the middle of the twentieth century embedded it within this planetary
perspective. The U.S. justified its foreign entanglements as the
responsibilities of Free World leadership; British MPs proclaimed their
country’s indispensability to the “free world” as a bridge between what they
declared were its principal parts—the U.S., Europe and the Commonwealth; France
demanded, and received, official support for defending the “free world’s” interests
in Indochina; the Three Powers formally extended “free world” membership to West Germany
in a 1952 convention; Washington consistently backed European federation
in an effort to secure greater “free
world” solidarity; and NATO publicly and privately declared its mission to be
the defense of the “free world” within a larger network of “free world
alliances” that eventually encompassed the Baghdad Pact (including Iran, Iraq,
Pakistan, Turkey and the UK), the Rio Pact (originally including much of the
Americas), the Australia, New Zealand, and United States Security Treaty
(ANZUS), and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO).

The “free world” framework proved
remarkably successful in justifying a cohesive Western alliance and
U.S.-dominated global order of unprecedented power and scope. But the notion of
the “free world” was fraught with contradictions that eventually led to its
disappearance as an essential legitimizing concept. The idea that the “free
world” was engaged in an immediate, global, and existential crisis came into
conflict with the increasingly static nature of the Cold War. The national
freedom (by definition) of the “free world’s” component parts made U.S.
leadership a delicate affair and provoked jealousy among policymakers of the
Kremlin’s seemingly total control of the Communist “monolith.” And the
inclusion, by default, of all non-Communist nations within the Free World
created tension between a Western core and an Afro-Asian periphery of the
“uncommitted” and the “underdeveloped,” the “newly-emergent” and the
“non-aligned,” whose occasional rejection of Free World membership American
leaders interpreted as a form of false consciousness.

A common external enemy, they seem to believe, would explain
internal divisions in the present and require continued cohesion in the future.

Toward the end of the 1960s, many
of the fundamental assumptions of the “free world” framework no longer seemed
tenable. The Sino-Soviet split divided the supposedly monolithic “slave world”
into two competing camps, Communist world conquest appeared unlikely, and the
realities of Soviet life seemed increasingly distant from the Orwellian and
Arendtian images of totalitarianism. At the same time, a growing
countercultural movement in the West questioned the freedom of the “free world”
from within; a resurgent Europe began to reassert its foreign policy
independence (most notably in West Germany’s efforts to establish a
relationship with East Germany and France’s departure from NATO); and many former
colonies and developing states acquired recognition as a “Third World” of their
own, complicating the idea of a binary globe. By the early 1970s, the term
“free world” had almost completely disappeared from political discourse and
government documents across North America and Western Europe. Reagan would
later revive a rhetoric of anti-communist freedom, but in a more unilateralist,
American key.

The concept of the “free world” was
discarded, but its Western core remained intact, unchallenged by any real
alternative and hegemonic enough—economically, culturally, and militarily—not to worry about justifying its continued existence. For the remainder of the
century, its foreign policy focused on the export of neoliberal economics,
human rights, and democracy to the newly-identified “Third World” and,
following the collapse of the USSR, to the former communist East. The European
Union was constructed as a separate economic entity, but remained
unquestioningly under the American defense umbrella. Together, the EU and NATO
expanded eastward to include many of the former “captive nations” of the Cold
War, even as Russia itself remained an awkward institutional adversary. The
Western liberal system, its champions declared, was surging across the world,
and History itself had come to an end.

This vision remains unfulfilled.
The universalizing Western order has encountered increasingly powerful
resistance from without. Perhaps more important, its core institutions and
ideological tenets have been challenged from within. Across Europe and North
America, traditional parties have been captured by outsiders or have been
threatened, and at times supplanted, by anti-establishment alternatives. All of
these forces, whether on the socialist Left or the anti-immigrant Right, accuse
the liberal order of failing to represent the people and share an antipathy
toward European and Western international institutions. The assumed community
of fundamental interests binding the countries of North America and Europe has
been called into question. The result has been a crisis in the legitimacy of
the Western core of the former “free world.” What is its ultimate purpose and
who does it define itself against? Defenders of the North Atlantic nexus,
unable to respond to the first question, have rushed to propose an answer to
the second. A common external enemy, they seem to believe, would explain
internal divisions in the present and require continued cohesion in the future.

China represents one potential
outside to the West’s inside. It is a former Cold War foe, a powerful
geopolitical competitor, and a self-confident civilizational alternative. But
China is perhaps too distant, both geographically and culturally, to serve as a
readily comprehensible antagonist. More important, the Western economic order,
and the American dollar in particular, depends on Chinese goodwill far too much
for statesmen to risk antagonizing Beijing with reckless rhetoric.

After 9/11, Islam seemed to reprise
its role as the traditional Other on the borders of a Western, Christian
civilization. President George W. Bush’s War on Terror sought to identify
“radical Islam” as the common enemy of a willing coalition. But terrorism
turned out to be too diffuse and far-flung, an enemy without headquarters,
difficult to discern or defeat. A never-ending peripheral engagement
unconnected to any conceivable large-scale threat proved unconvincing as
grounds for increased Western solidarity.

Instead, Islam became an internal
challenge, raising questions about immigration and assimilation, identity and
culture, borders and security. Rather than reinforcing a broader Western
cohesion, the perception of Islam as an alien force has given rise to
right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the European and Atlanticist liberal
system in the name of an older and narrower national identity.

The antagonist best suited to
provide the western world with a renewed raison d’être is its original Cold War
enemy. Russia can be kept comfortably outside of the West (unlike Islam), but
looms large as a historically familiar foe just beyond its border (unlike
China). It is militarily strong enough to seem legitimately, and perhaps existentially,
threatening (unlike Islam), but is not so economically massive as to give rise
to any real worry about causing offense (unlike China). Finally, Russia is
indeed interested in supporting the dismantling of an alliance that was set up
in opposition to it.

But Russia too, is a problematic
enemy. In the current Western construct, it represents nothing beyond
aggression, subversion, and the pathological personality of Putin. Its
objectives are all described in the negative. It seeks to sow division and
destroy democracy, but contains no ideological substance remotely comparable to
communism. When, in 1950, Eisenhower called on American citizens to “fight the
big lie with the big truth,” the communist propaganda he hoped to counter
contained a coherent message that appealed to a broad section of Western
intellectuals. Today’s “fake news” is generated by bots and aims for no
discernible ideological consistency. An enemy with no positive content of its
own makes for an uncertain opposite number.

The precise nature of a Western
alliance encompassing members of NATO and the EU, and centered on the U.S., the
U.K., Germany, and France, is similarly difficult to describe. The “free world”
framework within which it was created in the 1950s may have been morally
simplistic and rife with the contradictions that ultimately contributed to the
concept’s disappearance, but it also provided a clear formula for determining
who was inside and who was outside and on what grounds. The Western core of the
former “free world” remains, but its institutional foundations and conceptual
legitimacy have come under fire. Who, precisely, does it represent? And what,
if anything, should it be called? The defense of an uncertain construct against
an empty enemy makes a final victory difficult to imagine.

Peter Slezkine is a PhD candidate in international history at Columbia University.